Cross-Cultural Research

Analysis of a small sample of cross-cultural data suggests that slavery evolves through three stages in precivilized societies. At first, slaves are mainly war captives from other societies and serve primarily to symbolize the dominance of the victor over the vanquished: their economic func tion is minimal. Second, the importance of "dominance slavery" declines as the locus of the dominance struggle shifts to some extent from between to within societies, developing on a larger scale with a diversified struc ture and hierarchy. Finally, economic power becomes stratified until poverty forces an increasing proportion of the population into "economic slavery," the purpose of which is primarily productive exploitation, and which is ultimately codified in law along with other economic and au thority relationships in higher precivilized societies.

The second supplement to O'Leary's 1969 bibliography of cross-cultural studies is presented.

With few exceptions, researchers in culture evolutionary theory have given short shrift to the data and issues of specific, as opposed to general, evolution (i.e. to process and sequences that are bound to specific spatial contexts vs. those that are, or are presumed to be, hologeistic). In this paper, data from two disparate and well-delimited sequences, Pre-Norman England and Lowland Classic Maya (data assembled respectively by Rob ert Carneiro and S. G. Morley), are fitted to the same math ematical model, the hyperbolic tangent variant of the "lazy-S" curve. It is demonstrated that growth and development in these two sequences, though clearly in different phases, is adequately epitomized by that function, when suitable parameters are es timated empirically.

This paper is programmatic, in the sense that it provides an example of how one might do systematic statistical comparisons of growth processes between specific evolutionary sequences, and how these might contribute to general evolutionary theory. In this connection, the paper contains a brief discussion of growth-rate research in other social science areas. [Cultural evolution; culture patterns; mathematical models.]

Otterbein has found that a major cultural element in the tendency of a society to expand its territory appears to be its level of military so phistication. However, this is evidently not the only warfare charac teristic related to territorial expansion. A further examination of his data indicates that the psychocultural element of aggressiveness or "ferocity," as measured by a tencency of the society to attack, is even more strongly related to territorial expansion than is military sophis tication. A high level of ferocity in a culture may also lead to internal fighting and the disintegration of a society, however. This internal fight ing must be controlled by strong authoritarian measures before the society's aggressiveness will produce territorial expansion.